Re: Aspiring highest-order programmer

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 06/12/04 

Date: 11 Jun 2004 18:15:02 -0700

Christopher Barber <cbarber@curl.com> wrote in message news:<psozn7arxca.fsf@unicron.curl.com>...
> spinoza1111@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) writes:
>
> > I have replied separately to your request that I describe my
> > understanding of the applied theory of NP-completeness. It was
> > probably a mistake to do so, since anything other than what on usenet
> > corresponds to moronized rote memorization (cutting and pasting a
> > Wikipedia) will be "deconstructed" in a Sophistical, but moronic,
> > fashion, to "prove" that "he doesn't know what he's talking about",
> > when I do.
>
> You have so far not yet proved that you understand what NP-complete means.
> That is nothing to be ashamed of, it is a somewhat esoteric concept for most
> programmers, but from what you have posted so far, you don't seem to truly
> understand what it is about.

You are playing a game that derives from the fact that during my long
career, "intellectual" "property" considerations have transformed
active knowledge into dead secrets in such a way that one can never,
in an exchange like this, "prove" that he or she has human knowledge.

The reason is alienation. IP concerns are that knowledge becomes part
of inventory and in this context, an unalienated individual making
knowledge claims independent of the organization can always be
renarrated as at worst not having "knowledge" and at worst as a
charlatan.

The interesting result is that mentoring disappears and is replaced by
ideological training and indoctrination. The interesting result is
that today's programmers repeat the mistakes of the past because their
elders aren't man enough any more to make knowledge claims lest some
suit or some fat woman from human resources "expose" the "hollowness"
of their claims.

The corporate game is that you are "human resources" and you don't
understand the theory, therefore anything I say can be and will be
misread.

The telling detail in exchanges of this nature is that the person who
adopts the role of Authority is always careful never to let the cat,
so to speak, out of the bag, by himself explaining his own
understanding. The name of the game is the elimination of
knowledge-independent-of-organizations, after all, so for the person
playing the role of Authority, Job One becomes being silent on his own
knowledge claims, and instead destroying the knowledge claims of
another.
>
> > Thus today I am confident that computer science students learn "all
> > about" NP-completeness and are able to regurgitate the material on
> > their examinations. I am equally confident that they then, on their
> > first job, develop programs that behave in the NP complete fashion.
>
> Of course, that would be expected if they are writing code that solves an
> NP-complete problem. If you mean that inexperienced programmers may sometimes
> use bad algorithms, I am sure I would agree, but you should not use the
> terminology "NP complete fashion" to describe this. NP completeness refers to
> a property of the problem domain, not the algorithm choosen to solve it.
>
You've missed the fact, in your unconscious anxiety not to make
positive knowledge claims in a venue long terrorised by thugs, that
the algorithms are isomorphic to the the problems.

The academic meaning "this problem is solvable only by an algorithm
whose efficiency formula is nonpolynomial" has been transformed by
recent usage (and only usage) to mean that the PROBLEM is "np
complete" or "np" but the definition implies the existence of the
overcomplex algorithm.

In place of understanding you are instead demanding adherence to a
pragmatic terminology which is merely praxis.